HÀ NỘI — The 23rd ITTF-Asian Table Tennis Championships will be held in Jiangsu Province’s Wuxi City, China this weekend.

The Championships will welcome around 300 athletes from 30 countries to compete in men’s and women’s singles and doubles, mixed doubles and team matches. Eight Vietnamese athletes who participated in the ASEAN Championship three months ago will take part in the eight-day tournament.

The four men and four women are currently the best of the country based on their positions at the national championship and other high-ranked tournaments in 2016.

At the ASEAN competition, Nguyễn Anh Tú won a men’s singles gold medal while his teammate Mai Hoàng Mỹ Trang took a women’s singles silver. The two athletes also triumphed in the men’s and women’s team categories.

The Asian championship is a biennial tournament regarded as the continental championships by the International Table Tennis Federation.

Games will be organised at the Wuxi Sports Centre.

The draws will be made under the supervision of Asian Table Tennis Union’s Technical and Umpire Committee on Saturday.

Team events will be divided into Champion Division and First Division.

Based on the number of entries, all teams — excluding the top six teams from the last Asian Championships — will be divided into groups of three or four teams.

In the first stage, all groups play in round robin system to determine their positions. In the second stage, group winners play in a progressive knock-out system to determine the top two teams (winner and runner-up) that directly enter the Champion Division.

Other teams play in a progressive knock-out system to decide their final positions.

Champion Division consists of top six teams from the last Asian Championships in 2015 and top two teams from the First Division.

All matches will be played in best of five games.

All individual events shall be played in a knock-out five-set system in all stages of the competition.

The finals are scheduled on April 16.

Last year, China grabbed six out of seven titles in Thailand. The only gold medal they did not win was in the women’s doubles, which belonged to the North Korean squad.

After the Wuxi event, teams will then head to Germany for the world tournament next month. — VNS